With iOS 6, Apple proved that Notification Center widgets can come in handy for things other than just viewing information at a glance. The stock Share widget can let you post updates to your favorite social networks with ease, while users of jailbroken devices have access to a whole world of NC add-ons that can be used to do some truly useful stuff. NC widgets related to almost all areas of iOS have been released in the Cydia store, and music playback is no exception. Previously we covered Now Playing for NC - a Cydia tweak that can let users control their music using a couple of buttons placed inside a widget. NCMusicGestures does something similar, but uses gesture control for the purpose. You can scrobble your music to Twitter and Facebook, while changing a song takes merely a swipe.

NCMusicGestures has to be enabled manually by heading to the Notifications section of the stock Settings app. The widget has two main parts. The lower half is for album art and other song information, while the upper portion houses the seek bar of the song and lets you skip to different points in the track. If you swipe across this bar without using the seek knob, the widget’s sharing options are revealed. You can post the information of the song you are listening to on both Facebook and Twitter. The third button in the sharing row lets users donate to the developer.

On the surface, it might appear that there is nothing more than the above that NCMusicGestures can accomplish, but there are a few other features as well. Tap the album art once if you want to pause the playback right from your Notification Center. Other gestures supported by the add-on let users skip to the next song in their current playlist by swiping to the right on the album art, or go back to the previous one with a similar leftward swipe.

NCMusicGestures is a pretty well-designed widget, but we faced a few performance issues during our little test run. After enabling the add-on, the SpringBoard crashed, but that might have been a one-off issue on our device. So if you have always been a fan of gesture control, it is probably time to move on from Now Playing to NCMusicGestures. The tweak is available as a free download in the BigBoss repo of the Cydia store, and can only control tracks that are played from the stock Music app.